REVIEW: Bigger 10.5 inch iPad Pro packs power, fun

Mark Furler is APN Australian Regional Media’s group digital editor. He’s an award-winning journalist who has lived and worked on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast for more than 25 years. He’s passionate about fighting for a better go for locals. His awards include APN Editor of the Year, and involvement in three PANPA Newspaper of the Year wins for the Sunshine Coast Daily.

AFTER a long day at the office staring at a computer screen, sometimes the last thing you want to do is look at another device.

Unless it's stretching back on the couch, checking out cool apps on the new 10.5 inch iPad Pro.

This latest iteration is definitely a step up from the last 9.7 inch model.

What is most noticeable first up, apart from a 20% larger Retina display, is the super clever ProMotion technology which provides for refresh rates of 120Hz.

Scrolling through a website, magazine flipboard or word processing document is superbly smooth on the eye.

Coupled with the Apple Pencil, which now has 20-millisecond latency, creating art or editing photos is fluid fun.

My wife enjoys colouring in while watching TV, and doing that on an iPad, is a relaxing, laid back experience.

But it's not just about entertainment. The iPad Pro is increasingly being pitched at professionals - those who need powerful technology they can take with them on the road.

iPad Pro

While Windows users will prefer Microsoft's Surface Pro, for Apple fans, the iPad Pro is becoming a richer experience, thanks to some top apps.

I spent some time checking out Photos Affinity - a fully featured photo editing program that can do everything from deep etches to photo transformations - in minutes.

In our office, we have artists to do that sort of work - and it can be time consuming.

A decent photo etch could take 30 minutes to an hour - or for an amateur like me - hours.

In Affinity, it literally is beautifully simple and quick.

iPad Pro

Removing unwanted items from a photo takes seconds. You can also do RAW editing, add filters, adjust lighting, replace sky, work in multiple channels, change eye colour, tones, hide noisy skies. The list of options, each featuring tutorials, is endless.

Other apps which make great use of the iPad Pro include Paper, Procreate and the clever Adobe range, while Apple favourites like Garage Band and iMovie benefit from the increased screen real estate and processing power.

Looking at the beta version of the iOS 11, which will be released soon, there's also much to love with drag and drop functionality, the Files app, a customisable Dock and improved multitasking.

PC Authority wrote: "While the last generation A9 was no slouch, we were still staggered by the performance of the A10X in our benchmarks, scoring 9380 in our multicore tests and 3,930 for single core. That's almost double the performance of the iPad 9.7, and more importantly, smashes the 5,342 multicore score of the Core m3 Surface Pro. It also manages to beat the Core i5 model (7,544), meaning the iPad Pro is roughly on par with the top end Surface Pro."